|

|

|

Grand Theft Auto movie offers not 'worth risking one's crown jewels'

Given that Grand Theft Auto games increasingly are love letters to crime movies, it is a little curious that we haven't seen Hollywood tackle GTA yet. We've already been cursed with Dead or Alive and Postal movies, after all, and Rockstar clearly aches to be taken seriously. The problem, series writer Dan Houser has said, is that no one's made a good enough offer.

Given that Grand Theft Auto games increasingly are love letters to crime movies, it is a little curious that we haven't seen Hollywood tackle GTA yet. We've already been cursed with Dead or Alive and Postal movies, after all, and Rockstar clearly aches to be taken seriously. The problem, series writer Dan Houser has said, is that no one's made a good enough offer.

"The money's never been close to be worth risking one's crown jewels," Houser told OXM.

Our small dabblings with Hollywood have always left us running back to games. The freedom we have to do what we want creatively is of enormous value. The second you go near Hollywood, people seem willing, or have been forced, to lose a lot of that control. That sort of amorphous 'that won't test well' attitude is exactly how we don't work. We've always tried to think of stuff that's innovative and new, and to go into a world where that's not encouraged would be horrible.

It sounds fair enough. Churning out a movie might make a few bucks, but could harm Take-Two's cash cow franchise. How terrible it would be if the movie's makers referenced the wrong movies, forced in awful love interests, or failed to establish the right tone and turned GTA into a absurd contradiction of hollow characters, tedious melodrama, and cartoonish mass murder.